Video Game & Nerd Culture Wars

August 3, 2016

Posted 8/3/16

1. Ghostbusters 2016
Universally-hated youtube preview spawns endless media coverage about “misogynistic, racist manbabies” who only disliked the video because it has women. Massive publicity due to this “controversy” creates progressive “girl power”/feminism bucks and critics are obligated to give the film positive reviews or else face accusations of misogyny.

Popular youtuber “Angry Video Game Nerd” (James Rolfe) said he refused to see the film because the preview looked bad and he was tired of shitty reboots of beloved franchises. This was met by a widespread, concerted abuse campaign accusing him of sexism and misogyny.

Red Letter Media (whose 6+ hour long star wars prequel review you MUST watch if you haven’t already) came out this week with a post-mortem on how the entire “misogyny” controversy was a shrewd publicity stunt by Sony, which suggests that accusations of sexism is an effective way to silence critics of anything including a mediocre comedy being sold by a mega-corporation – and also a reliable way to attract progressive sympathy bucks from activists who want to “fight the patriarchy.”

2. Notch-related Controversies
Notch, creator of Minecraft, with 3.79M twitter followers, has found himself on the “wrong side” of the nerd culture war several times, recently earning himself a hit-piece in infamous anti-GG (anti-Gamegate) Gawker Media outlet Kotakuaccusing him of being sexist and a privileged white male.

Today (8/3/16), a lengthy interview with Notch by (GG-friendly) Escapist Magazine where they discuss some of the controversies:

3. Polygon’s Fail First Look Video of Doom
Three months ago, anti-GG outlet Polygon posted a hilarious “First Look” video of Doom…played by someone who obviously has never played a First Person Shooter before.

Apart from being an incredibly poor “First Look” video with agonizingly-slow progression, the video highlighted a wider criticism of polygon and other progressive game review outlets: they don’t really seem to be real gamers who like or care about games the same way their consumers do. It seemed to emphasize the divide that had grown between gamers and the media who seemed to only exist to tell us how sexist and racist we are, rather than actually celebrating or objectively reviewing the game itself.

Related, Polygon had also complained loudly about not being given an advance copy of Doom like other respected games review outlets. Penny Arcade had this to say: